barbara rose

“Clown of the Party” from POBA, the internet artist graveyard. (Pete Ham)

“The glittering chains of galaxies are no more substantial, no more reliable guides to physical reality, than greasepaint on the face of a clown.” A New York Times video on dark matter shows the visible universe to be only five percent of the larger universe, which scientists are only now beginning to plot. This invisible universe, which is defined by dark matter, is the scaffolding for the galaxies we see today. [The New York Times]

Art critic Barbara Rose has been buddies with artist Carl Andre since the 1950s; that camaraderie shows through in her Brooklyn Rail review of Andre’s retrospective at DIA. It might go down in history as the most glowing review ever written about the artist. (Of course, no mention of Ana Mendieta.) [The Brooklyn Rail]

Paddy Johnson profiles digital artist Nicolas Sassoon. Sassoon is currently completing an online residency for Opening Times, a non-profit that supports online artists based in London, and has been working on creating browser-sized GIFs. [Artnet]

This might be a scam: a site was launched yesterday that provides, at an annual rate of $49.95, immortality (at least on the Internet). POBA: Where the Arts Live, an online platform that asks grieving families, estate managers, or anybody who owns the rights to any artist’s legacy, to post the work of the deceased artist. It’s meant to be a site of commemoration, but really it just feels like an Internet graveyard. Creepy. [Hyperallergic]

Recommended Tonight: Collector’s Night at the Brooklyn Historical Society. You can see a woman’s collection of cockroach legs left in her apartment by her cat, all the clocks featured in the movie “Back to the Future,” and a stockpile of old bike seats. There will be piles of pins, dipsticks from automobiles, and objects found in cemeteries such as a dead bird, letters that have fallen off tombstones, and feathers. Also, 600 disco shirts, 300 neckties, and 90 pairs of shoes. In short: Go to this. [The New York Times]

The Whitney is putting on an event for teens during the Jeff Koons retrospective. AFC office response: “High school students can deal with cum on the face.” [The Whitney]

A public art space in London called The Wall, is being torn down. Why? Because the Residents Association see the current and inaugural work being shown, Stefan Bruggemann’s Text Pieces, to be an advertisement, not art. The Residents Association even struck an unnecessarily aggressive tone: “we want this amateur daub’s wish fulfilled in that it should be recognised when it is destroyed, as one of the mindless texts suggests.” Sign the petition to keep The Wall alive here. [Frieze Magazine via. Twitter]

Who’s behind the Artist Pension Trust, a royalties-based art sales firm? Moti Shniberg, a tech startup investor responsible for selling facial recognition technology to Facebook, and attempting to trademark the term “Sept. 11, 2001.” The latter, you can imagine, was a failed attempt. [Bloomberg]

In the 1960s and early 1970s, art and politics were peas in a pod. For die-hard critics like Barbara Rose, who lived through these decades in New York, that was the time to be alive. Art was good then, and now it sucks. Well, that’s how her argument goes, which which she makes in the pages of this month’s Brooklyn Rail. We disagree.